Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text : Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text

Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text
Author(s): Rafael Rodriguez

Social memory research has complicated the relationship between past and present because it is a relationship which finds expression in memorial acts such as storytelling and text-production.

This relationship has emerged as a dialectic in which "past" and "present" are mutually constitutive and implicating. The resultant complication directly affects the procedures and products of "historical Jesus" research, which depends particularly on the assumption that we can cleanly separate "authentic" from "inauthentic" traditions.

In Structuring Early Christian Memory Rafael Rodriguez analyzes the problems that arise from this assumption and proposes a "historical Jesus" program that is more sensitive to the entanglement of past and present.

Review(s):
“'In this revised Sheffield doctoral thesis, Rodriguez seeks to overcome certain polarizations which he claims have marked modern study of the Jesus tradition: textuality vs. orality, inauthenticity vs. authenticity, past vs. present. To do so, he develops a frameork utilizing the theory of social memory and recent work in oral traditionas  away of examining the construction of Jesus' reputation and the way the tradition about him was repeatedly performed both before and after the gospels were written.' David Lincicum, Mansfield College, Oxford” —Theological Book Review



ISBN:  9780567663085